Company

D-Wave Systems is the world’s first quantum computing company and the leader in the development and delivery of quantum computing systems and software. D-Wave’s mission is to unlock the power of quantum computing and solve the world’s most challenging problems.

Quantum computing, however, has a learning curve. Edward (Denny) Dahl, Principal Research Scientist, and lead trainer visit customer sites to conduct training classes for customers. He travels to customer locations to set up training environments for students. You might think that quantum computing needs equally complicated tools for training. But that’s not the case. One of the tools in Dahl’s toolbox is a simple spreadsheet that he uses to guide students through a sequence of models of a very simple quantum computer. Dahl wants to ensure that his tool is platform agnostic, as customers use heterogeneous environments, including Windows, macOS, and Linux. Not every spreadsheet program is compatible with all these platforms.

The good news is that LibreOffice is a fully open source project. Anyone can add the features they need. But it does mean a lot of work. It needs in-house resources and expertise. In many cases, that turns out to be counterproductive and more expensive. That’s where Collabora, as a company, enters the picture. We make it extremely easy for customers like D-Wave to work with us and implement the features and functionalities they need.

“We provided source code (VBA) to Collabora with the requirement that the Calc program should be extended to handle the VBA,” said Dahl “Collabora’s ability to extend the underlying VBA meant that the same spreadsheet could run under both Excel & LibreOffice. It meant that D-Wave did not have to maintain two separate VBA code bases, which was the deciding factor to go with Collabora, ”

The winner of their choice was Collabora Productivity as our LibreOffice-based solution met all of his requirements. Collabora enabled D-Wave to support the heterogeneous environment his customers were running and democratized his tool. With Collabora, D-Wave is able to go beyond laptops and run the tool anywhere, including public and private cloud.

Further information

To read more details about the success story, check out the case study document we have published.

On 19th October 2018, at Welle7 Workspace in Bern, Switzerland, we attended DINAcon – the conference on digital sustainability. Our General Manager, Michael Meeks, had a talk about “How best to migrate to LibreOffice”, where he explained the best ways to move to a supported Open Source and Open Standards solution. Also, he talked about Collabora’s latest work with our partners, and our new tool to migrate existing legacy Visual Basic line of business apps.

If you missed his talk then check out the slides above for the complete presentation:

DINAcon Awards!

Great news from Bern – we won the open source classic award at DINAcon! 🙂

For this award were running a lot of amazing open source products, including Collabora Online and Collabora Office. We are honored to receive this award – it is a big motivation for the whole team! Thanks a lot everyone for your support.

Hacknight

The conference ended with the hacknight and of course that we couldn’t miss it. It was the perfect time to work on LibreOffice bugs. 🙂

#DINAcon2018 HackNight is the perfect ending for a wonderful conference.

From August 23 until August 30, Nextcloud held their annual conference, including an enterprise day, providing enterprise focused talks about large scale use of Nextcloud, security, scalability, Real Time & Secure Collaboration with Collabora Online, and much more.

During the Enterprise Day, Collabora Productivity’s General Manager Michael Meeks gave a talk about Collabora Online in Nextcloud. Collabora Online is a powerful LibreOffice-based online office that supports all major document, spreadsheet, and presentation file formats, which is easy to deploy in Nextcloud, as a simple extension. Key features are collaborative editing and excellent office file format support.

Slides

Kolab Systems AG is an Open Source Independent Software Vendor (ISV) developing, maintaining, supporting and providing a wide range of services around the Kolab Groupware Solution. Collabora Online is available as an integrated component in Kolab. The integration of Collabora Online into Kolab allow users to compose text documents, fill in spreadsheets, and design presentations together, even when in different locations from each other.

“Kolab integrates the collaborative editing of office documents through its file cloud and integrates the use of third-party file cloud solutions with collaborative editing through Collabora
Online,” said Jeroen van Meeuwen, CTO, Kolab Systems AG.

As a result of our collaboration, Kolab systems customers get a fully-featured, Open Source, integrated solution for collaboration. Kolab and Collabora being Open Source help customers customize the solution where it needs to fit their needs, rather than adapting their needs to the solution provided.

Further information

To read more details on the integration of Collabora Online into Kolab, why they chose us etc, please check out the success story we have published.

Cambridge, United Kingdom – January 8, 2018 – Collabora Productivity, the driving force behind putting LibreOffice in the Cloud, and Nextcloud, the globally leading supplier of open source enterprise sync, share and communication technology, announce reaching over 100K downloads of the Collabora Nextcloud app in one year, showing strong growth of self-hosted online office market. Other metrics support this trend as well, Collabora has seen over two million docker image downloads of CODE, giving interested developers an easy way to get early access to the very latest feature additions and updates to LibreOffice Online. Some of these servers host thousands of users at at customers like RegioIT in Germany and North-West University in South Africa.

“This impressive number of installations over the last year shows the strong interest in both Nextcloud and collaborative editing among private cloud users” said Michael Meeks, General Manager at Collabora Productivity. “Nextcloud‘s strong focus on ease of use combined with a wealth of rich business functionality makes them a vital partner.”

On December 21, Collabora Productivity has announced their latest release of Collabora Online Development Edition – CODE 3.0, which, for the very first time brings full-feature editing dialogs, familiar from the PC LibreOffice version to the browser. Developers and home users are encouraged to update, try it out and get involved with the latest developments – however for enterprise production users are recommended to continue to use Collabora Online 2.1.5 or wait for the next release – due soon.

“Self hosted cloud solutions allow customers to reap the benefits of online collaboration while remaining in control over their data” said Andreas Rode, Head of Sales at Nextcloud GmbH. “Collabora Online is an excellent choice for enterprises wanting a powerful office suite for confidential documents on-premise or for Hosting and Cloud businesses who wish to include online Office Suite functionality into their service offering.”

Nextcloud uptake has been particularly strong among the security-sensitive sector of the wider Enterprise File Sync and Share Market, like businesses in finance, insurance, government and healthcare. Unique capabilities like the End-to-end Encryption in Nextcloud 13 as well as secure communication allow companies to ease GDPR compliance and dramatically improve data security in a world with growing legal and hacking threaths.

About Collabora Productivity:
Collabora Productivity is the driving force behind putting LibreOffice in the Cloud, providing a range of products and consulting to enterprise and government. Powered by the largest team of certified LibreOffice engineers in the world, it is a leading contributor to the LibreOffice codebase and community. Collabora Office for Desktop and Collabora Online provide a business-hardened office suite with long-term, multi-platform support. Collabora Productivity is a division of Collabora, the global software consultancy dedicated to providing the benefits of Open Source to the commercial world, specialising in mobile, automotive and consumer electronics industries. For more information, visit www.collaboraoffice.com or follow @CollaboraOffice on Twitter.

About Nextcloud:
Nextcloud offers the industry-leading fully open source solution for on-premise data handling and communication with an uncompromising focus on security and privacy and unprecedented scalability. Nextcloud brings together universal access to data with next-generation secure communication and collaboration capabilities under direct control of IT and integrated with existing compliant infrastructure. Nextcloud’s open, modular architecture, emphasis on security and advanced federation capabilities enable modern enterprises to leverage their existing assets within and across the borders of their organization. For more information, visit https://nextcloud.com or follow @Nextclouders on Twitter.